


this your kingdom

by schweet_heart



Series: Merlin Fic [138]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arthur Finds Out About Merlin’s Magic (Merlin), Banishment, Established Relationship, Exile, Graphic Description, Heavy Angst, Jealous Merlin, M/M, Magic Revealed, Merlin's Magic Revealed, Mutual Pining, Oblivious Merlin, POV Second Person, Post-Magic Reveal, Prose Poem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 21:56:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15567177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweet_heart/pseuds/schweet_heart
Summary: Here are all the ways that you don’t love him.





	this your kingdom

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to AP for looking this over for me, and to her and VerdantMoth for the inspiration. Any and all remaining errors are my own.
> 
> Title from ["Carry Your Throne" by Jon Bellion (NSFW)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI_bxix-6Xo).

 

Here are all the ways that you don’t love him:

 

1.

 

You don’t love him when he has a sword in his hand, standing over the body of a man who was just like you; a man whose only crime was to be born with a power that could topple dynasties and cause the death of queens. You don’t love him when he holds out his hand to you and hauls you to your feet, brushing off the dust like he hasn’t just broken your entire world apart—again—or the way he looks right through you as if you don’t exist; the way he can’t see what’s standing right in front of him.

 

2.

 

You don’t love the taste of blood on his skin. He tastes like a butcher, like raw meat, like something dangerous and broken all at once. You don’t love how kissing him makes you think of blood and ashes, or the way his hands blaze where they touch you, as if you are the wood and he is the fire, burning you alive. You don’t love the way you ache when he’s not touching you.

 

3.

 

You love his hands anyway. And his mouth. You love the way his eyes hold yours as he fucks you into the white linen sheets and the way he gasps your name into your skin, each syllable a bruise, the way he comes with his mouth open, eyes wide like he’s awestruck each and every time.

 

You don’t love the way he closes them afterwards.

 

4.

 

If you don’t love the way he touches you when you’re in public—casual, dismissive, like you’re so much furniture to be moved about on a whim—then you keep it to yourself. It’s not his fault that you want every time his hands are on you to feel like the first time you made love, unhurried and tender, or like it’s the last time he will ever touch you, when he’s determined never to let you go.

 

5.

 

You don’t love the way he looks at _her_ , either. Sometimes you feel like it’s already ending, like he’s sitting there putting his boots on the way he did that first night, getting ready to go.

 

“Stay here,” you tell him, desperate. “Stay with me.” You burnish the words into every link of his armour and you write them into his skin with each breath, but you know it will never be enough. Camelot needs a queen and he has been born and bred for duty, was always meant to be her king since long before he met you.

 

6.

 

You don’t love the way he can hurt you, sometimes, using only the way he says your name. You don’t love how it falls from his mouth shaped like a dead thing, a dagger, a snake, the way every time he says “I love you” it reminds you that he thinks you’re someone else. This is not his fault, either.

 

7.

 

You don’t love him for this: for his eyes, hard and wet, for the hand he fists in the kerchief at your neck and the way he kisses you, fingers in your hair and tongue in your mouth, before he whispers, broken, “You have to leave before he finds out. He won’t spare you when he realises what you are.”

 

And for this: “Don’t come back.”

 

8.

 

You don’t.

 

love.

 

him.

 

for all the days of your exile. You build monuments to your hatred in the Forest of Gedney, razing the trees with your thoughts and erecting a stone hut in their place, laying down brick by brick a wall to keep him out. You remember the way he turned from you when you left him, like he could no longer stand to see your face. You remember his silhouette at the window, not-watching, as if you wouldn’t have felt his gaze on you for miles no matter where you went.

 

You build your stone hut tall and strong and thatch the roof with willow branches. If he wanted to follow you, all he would have to do is follow the smoke, the birds, the way the forest bends towards you like a sighting archer, guiding his steps like an arrow aimed straight at your heart. If he wanted to find you, it would be only too easy, for the woods themselves would show him the way.

 

9.

 

You hate him for not coming after you.

 

10.

 

When he rides into the clearing it is in the dead of winter, and all the leaves are gone. The wind digs its fingers into the cracks in your walls and lets him in, sharp as frost, shedding ice like fine crystals on your doorstep. It is not a good time for new beginnings—the soil is hard and packed flat beneath the snow, the weather unforgiving. Still, you can’t help loving him a little for the way he tries anyway, for the way green buds seem to follow him, sending out unseasonable shoots from the dead earth.

 

“I gave it up,” he says, though you didn’t ask, and you’re not even a little bit in love with the tremor in his voice, or the way he makes you unfurl, too, your body seeking his like he’s the goddamn sun. “I couldn’t stand by and watch him kill them anymore.” His mouth in your hair, his hands at your waist. “I couldn’t stay there without you.”

 

“You shouldn’t have come,” you tell him, but you’re walking your fingers down his spine and you’re already straddling his hips so you don’t think he hears. “What about your destiny? What about the kingdom you were meant to build?”

 

“We’ll tear it down,” he whispers later, when he has spent himself inside you and you are drowsing, holding him close. “We’ll build a new one,” he answers, like it’s that simple. “We’ll make our own.”

 

These are all the ways you don’t love him. This is the way you have never loved him more.

 


End file.
